'Pain make man think. Thought make man wise. Wisdom make life endurable' : Sakini, in "The Tea House of the August Moon" by John Patrick, (1953)

Thursday, June 7, 2018

Jyotsna Vijapurkar - Unimportance of the right answer

The attempt to find an
answer is not only fun, but also the best part of learning. It develops
thinking, concentration, resilience, and perhaps even tells you something about
yourself. In other words, the path to the solution is equally, if not more
important than, the solution itself. Remove this, and concentrate on the
solution alone, and you deprive the learner of a rich opportunity to explore
all manner of things.

Not only the student,
but the teacher too loses something valuable in such practice: An opportunity
to learn the workings of the student’s mind — whether it’s a beautiful solution
to a problem, something the teacher or textbook writer hadn’t thought of, or
the reason the student did not get the solution right away. The “mistakes”
students make are wonderful windows through which you can look into the
workings of their minds, particularly with young students who may not be able
to articulate whether or not they understood something.

As teachers, once we
get an idea of how or what the student is thinking, we can incorporate these
insights into our teaching. And in doing so, keep our teaching practice from
becoming a tedious one — teaching the same lessons over and over again, in the
same manner, even difficult ones that only a few students can really
understand... read more: